Individuals and enterprises as a whole have been storing their documents in electronic systems for some years now. This trend is increasing and shows no real signs of abating. In fact, many enterprises have now mandated that employees and vendors maintain a paperless environment. Such policies are good for the environment and reduce expenses for the enterprise because less paper and ink are used when documents need to be retrieved. Additionally, more information is retained in an electronic environment than what would have actually occurred if documents were retained via a manual and physical filing system.
Some enterprise documents are stored in databases or document management systems. These systems have their own search interfaces. For example, a database system may use a Structured Query Language (SQL) interface to permit search and retrieval against a database.
However, a vast majority of information that each individual of an enterprise has is never worthy of being stored in a database and never intended to be stored in a database because it would overload the enterprise database system. This type of information is often personal documents of employees or even individual uses having their own independent personal computers.
So, when a user desires to locate a document on their file system or even an entire network file system of an enterprise, a file system search is conducted. Anyone with even the smallest amount of documents on a single computer that has attempted such a search knows that the search takes a substantial amount of time and usually burns a lot of processing cycles on the user's computer in the process.
Therefore, there is little debate that file system searching is time consuming and inefficient. Furthermore, these problems are exponentially exacerbated as the amount of available documents and files on a file system being searched increases.
Thus, what are needed are improved techniques for file system searching.